“Chérie, when this is handed to you, I shall be sitting in my coach on the dull Dover road, with frost-clouded windows and a heart heavier than your leaden skies. Loveliest of women, all things must end; and, despite your childlike trust in man’s virtue, you could scarce hope for eternity to a bond that was too strong for friendship and too weak for love. Dearest, had you given yourself that claim upon love and honour which we have talked of, and which you have ever refused, no lesser power than death should have parted us. I would have dared all, conquered all, for my dear mistress. But you would not. It was not for lack of fervid prayers that the statue remained a statue; but a man cannot go on worshipping a statue for ever. If the Holy Mother did not sometimes vouchsafe a sign of human feeling, even good Catholics would have left off kneeling to her image. “Or, shall I say, rather, that the child remains a child—fresh, and pure, and innocent, and candid, as in the days when we played our _jeu de volant_ in your grandmother’s garden—fit emblem of the light love of our future years. You remained a child, Hyacinth, and asked childish love-making from a man. Dearest, accept a cruel truth from a man of the world—it is only the love you call guilty that lasts. There is a stimulus in sin and mystery that will fan the flame of passion and keep love alive even for an inferior object. The ugly women know this, and make lax morals a substitute for beauty. An innocent intrigue, a butterfly affection like ours, will seldom outlive the butterfly’s brief day. Indeed, I sometimes admire at myself as a marvel of constancy for having kept faith so long with a mistress who has rewarded me so sparingly. “So, my angel, I am leaving your foggy island, my cramped London lodgings, and extortionate London tradesmen, on whom I have squandered so much of my fortune that they ought to forgive me for leaving a margin of debt, which I hope to pay the extortioners hereafter for the honour of my name. I doubt if I shall ever revisit England. I have tasted all London pleasures, till familiarity has taken the taste out of them; and though Paris may be only London with a difference, that difference includes bluer skies, brighter streets and gardens, and all the originals of which you have here the copies. There, at least, I shall have the fashion of my peruke and my speech at first hand. Here you only adopt a mode when Paris begins to tire of it.